Category Archives: America

A year of Move To Fire – here come the holidays

It’s been a roller coaster of a year since I released Move To Fire. Here are the highs and lows:

  • Shortly after its release I get a wonderful reaction from best selling author Seth Godin and he gives me the book’s first blurb (a personal and professional highlight).
  • Publishers Weekly not only gives it a starred review, it follows that with the placement of Move To Fire at the top of its first ever IndieWatch booklist, a new quarterly feature listing well-reviewed, independently published books (ditto that personal/professional parenthetical above).Move To Fire -- "a taut thriller"
  • Award winning author — and friend — Brian Fies gives it a heartfelt, objective, great review.
  • Amazon reviews come in and they’re positive; readers really like the book; as a bonus, many write that “I couldn’t put this book down,” which is very special because that’s exactly what I had wanted to achieve.
  • I get representation by one of the best nonfiction agents in the business
  • The book gets a nice mention by stellar journalist Robin Abcarian in her LA Times feature about the attorney featured in the story
  • My screenwriting partner and I start to get a sliver of legitimate interest in a film project based on the book

Notice the lack of anything mentioning sales? Yeah, it’s tough, and I find it hard to express just how much I appreciate everyone who bought a copy. It’s a struggle, and your loyalty, and leaps of faith, will never be forgotten.

Let’s use the lack of sales thing to transition to the low:

  • We submit the book to major publishers for consideration — names that even only occasional readers would recognize —  and ALL praise it (“…astonishingly well written…”), and pass on it, because “we just don’t know how to ‘position’ it…”, or, as one summed up, “books about guns don’t sell.”

Been fighting that idea, that this is “a book about guns,” constantly.

But I know, I got nothin’ to whine about, really.

So this is an update, a thank you, and to whatever the next year brings. I’ll keep you all updated… (think movie, movie, movie).

Move To Fire in the L.A. Times

Journalist Robin Abcarian did a nice profile piece on attorney Richard Ruggieri. Move To Fire is mentioned in article and in an accompanying photo you can see the book on a shelf behind Ruggieri. check it out here.

Attorney Richard Ruggieri

Attorney Richard Ruggieri

http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-gun-attorney-20160909-snap-story.html

New Move To Fire excerpt — Ripples

The pilot set a course that paralleled highway 101 and, at some point, overtook Sue and Clint in their car below. Both vehicles were moving the family away from their previous, normal lives and toward an unknown future. Brandon was flying away from a normal childhood, leaving behind games of hide and seek in the woods, adventures on his bike and baseball games in the summer. Whether he lived or died, he would never take another step, never wave hello or goodbye, and never hug again.
Ripples from the accident moved through the entire community, and the effects would touch, alter, and impact hundreds of lives. From its small but explosive beginning, the accident’s economic and financial impact on people, schools, the health care and legal systems wouldn’t be fully realized for years, but the effect on the local emergency services and medical system was already substantial, quickly hitting the tens of thousands of dollars in hard costs for the sheriff, paramedics and CDF responses, the ambulance and emergency room treatment, physicians and staff.
The ripple was now moving south at an altitude of two-thousand feet. Every passing minute the REACH chopper was in the air was a minute of calculated risk, and this flight would add $5,000 to the growing costs of Brandon’s accident.
As in so many other aspects of their lives, the family was no different than many blue collar and low income working families, in that they had no health insurance to speak of, nothing that would address anything as catastrophic as Brandon’s sudden medical and health care needs. At a point in the very near future, they would be forced to deal with the paperwork, documents and liens associated with all of this, but right now their toll was psychological, emotional devastation.
The drive to Santa Rosa Memorial hospital took almost ninety minutes. When they arrived, Sue and Clint were told the flight had been redirected to Oakland’s Children’s Hospital, another ninety-minute drive to the southeast.
They had left Willits an hour and a half ago, not knowing the condition of their boy, but because the helicopter had not stopped in Santa Rosa, no one there had any information about Brandon. Clint and Sue wouldn’t know Brandon’s condition for at least another thirty minutes.

The second excerpt

Here’s your second Move To Fire excerpt, lightly edited. A bit long, also from the book’s foreword, but this will give you all an insight you almost certainly didn’t have about what it means to have certain guns on the streets:

“…[Move To Fire] corrects misconceptions about what happened to a little boy… why it happened, and recounts how the unwavering work of one man resulted in a measure of justice for a family, and a society, unjustly wounded by the status quo.

But underlying it all is something so crucially relevant yet widely unknown that without it there would be no Move To Fire story.

…consumer products are regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission… to protect the public against unreasonable risks of injuries and deaths associated with consumer products.
But not if that consumer product is a gun…

…there have been and are defective guns that can fire without the trigger being touched, but they cannot be recalled or taken off the market except by the manufacturer… And no government entity can force a gun manufacturer to recall or remove all those models.

So, the worst extension of all this is that an unethical gun manufacturer could choose to create and sell a gun it knew to be defective, and, still, no entity could stop that from happening.

That happened.”